


For the Halibut

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Also Mayoridan Is My OTP And It Should Be Yours, Commercial Fishing In The Northern Pacific AU, Eridan Ampora Being an Asshole, Eridan Trying To Get Better, Extensive Descriptions Of Working On A Longline Fixed Gear Vessel, Gen, I Can't Write Fucking Anything Without Strilonde Nonsense I Am Sorry, M/M, Rarepair For No Reason It Fucking Works, So Much Fucking Strilonde Nonsense, The Portmanteau Is Too Fucking Good, This Is My Moby Dick, This Is The Most Self Indulgent Thing I Have Ever Written Including The Clonefucking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 14:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20640698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: Eridan Ampora is a newly-minted fisheries observer assigned to the fixed gear longline catcher vessel The Prince of Heart.Between sibling rivalries on the high seas, extremely shitty boat coffee, a familial wager of massive scale, interspecies awkwardness, and his silent Carapician bunkmate, it's pretty clear that this is going to suck worse than anything has ever sucked, which is really fuckin' saying something.Or perhaps the month-long voyage could change him and the crew for the better. Sure, maybe.He doesn't hold out hope.





	For the Halibut

As of today, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, you have roughly eleven sweeps, a marine biology degree from UW, a freshly-printed certificate confirming that you’ve completed your education as a fisheries observer, and a somewhat rusty, serrated knife from a bucket labelled ‘free knives’ that you found in the gear hangar all either figuratively or literally under your belt.

Shit. No. It’s 1330 for all of your paperwork. You’re definitely going to fuck this up.

Your name is Eridan Ampora, and you have never been more terrified than you are in this moment, standing on the ramp overlooking the small-vessel harbor where you’re scheduled to meet the captain for the safety orientation prior to the first voyage of your deployment.

Part of it is the fact that you’re dragging eighty pounds of gear in a set of five baskets in addition to your overstuffed duffel and backpack, and as you begin to haul it down, it makes an unearthly clattering noise.

If you weren’t attracting the attention of every fucking deckhand in the harbor before, you definitely are now.

For a troll, especially for a violetblood like yourself, the weight isn’t actually a hardship. You’re pretty sure that’s part of the reason the observer program opened its doors to the Alternian paradox-space refugees who’ve been settling into earth for the last few decades; you’re a tough son of a bitch, no matter what anyone (everyone, pretty much) says. It’s in your goddamned blood. You could probably just hoist the stupid baskets and carry them in your arms or whatever, but you don’t have even one free hand since your awful flip phone is already out and in your palm and you’ve also got your regulation life jacket to contend with, whether or not you can literally breathe underwater.

It’s just a lot of pressure, okay? You’re kinda breaking new ground here as part of the first species-integrated class to graduate from the training program onto an observer position on the human-majority fleet in the Northern Pacific.

“Can’t you swim?” a middle-aged human man, probably a tourist and not even a crew member on any of these vessels himself, calls down from the sidewalk above the dock as you pause to yank your baskets of scales and sample vials and ID guides over an uneven slat in the dock.

Really, could the goddamned standard-issue vest be any more neon-orange-obvious?

Be professional. Be professional. Your gills are flaring, compressed slightly by the stupid life jacket, and you can feel your blood pressure ticking up, but you’re representing your company and _your whole fucking species_. Be professional. Come on. Keep it together.

“Go fuck yourself!” you shout back, then wince.

You’re here to board a seventy-five-foot fixed gear longline vessel called, according to your advisor, the Prince of Heart. It’s a crazy long voyage for your first trip; you’re slated to spend four weeks with these people, and they are _people_. The captain texted you half an hour ago, and you hurried down to the docks as quickly as you could, given that you had to drag all this shit about half a mile from the bunkhouse.

The baskets continue to rattle as you drag them along the dock. People actually leave their quarters to see what the fuck is making such a racket. Some ship’s dog starts to bark.

Most of the time, you’re pretty good at keeping your chin up through this kind of stuff. You’re from a noble bloodline, regardless of the way that means just about fuckall on earth. Your dad expects a lot from you, considering the bar for him is about as fucking low as bars get (very low) since he’s part of the first wave of trolls to raise a coupla kids in the human-ish way. Basically if he didn’t eat you or maim you he’d have walked away with the troll dad of the fucking year trophy, since that’s the kind of shit most general-population humans still seem to expect from your species.

So you’re _tough_, really. You went to private troll-specific schools for most of your life, so you don’t have the weird human-worship shit or the fucked-up superiority complex deal that some trolls seem to end up with. You integrated pretty well in college! Honestly, most of the shit you’ve taken over the years is more about who you, well, _personally_ are, not for the fact that you’re not, y’know, a person.

Or legally you are, you guess.

It’s weird. This is why you stayed the fuck away from the legislation and the policy and the whatever in school. Your older brother kinda went that route, since it’s sorta a status thing for your dad, but you figured you could probably beat Cronus at his own game, cut the gordian knot, yada-yada-whatever, by going straight to the core of all the ‘remember who you are’ stories from your childhood and get yourself to the ocean by any means necessary.

And hey, it worked. He actually said he was proud of you. Paid for a bunch of the gear on your list, expensive boots, that kinda stuff. Pretty big deal from the guy whose reaction to your getting a free ride to your top choice school was that he hoped you were planning on getting a free ride to a summer job soon.

Observing isn’t a prestigious kinda job, but it’s real shit, the sorta thing you know - well, you hope - that you were born to do. Freezing cold seas, collecting data on their contents, ensuring that stocks of fish persist and the laws of the ocean are heeded. You’re coldblooded, a seadweller, biologically adapted for literally this exact thing.

If only you could find the fucking Prince of Heart out here on this infinite fucking dock of a thousand semi-identical boats. You’re going to be late. The captain, whose eerily well-written and perfectly punctuated text message made yours look like shit in comparison, is going to hate you. Shit. And people are still staring. And you’ve already managed to make a scene.

You pass, to be frank, a lot of shitty boats, growing more anxious by the second. Four weeks is a long time. Almost a third of your ninety-day contract. This could suck. This could really fucking suck. This is extremely going to suck, and you are going to suck at this, and your dad is going to disown you or possibly eat you (you’ve read the tabloids! It’s happened!) and that’s if the crew doesn’t fucking gaff you and cut you up for bait.

The pure anxiety, this time, rather than rage, makes your gills flair.

When you find your boat, though, only a minute or two behind schedule, it seems like you might have finally caught a break. She’s a beautiful ship. Your dad has a speedy thirty-foot vessel for sport fishing - fine, your family is pretty loaded - and he keeps it pristine, but even he’d be impressed by both the size and the immaculate cleanliness of the ship before you. It’s hard to believe this is only 75 feet.

Taking a moment to catch your breath and set down your things, you glance down at the phone in your hand, click through to the text message you received earlier, and call the captain’s number.

It rings only once before picking up.

“Uh, hey, Captain Strider?” you say, wincing at how stupid your voice sounds. “It’s the observer, Eridan, you texted me earlier?”

Stop ending your sentences in question marks, idiot, you sound stupid, he’s going to think you’re some green idiot piece of shit, which you are, obviously, but you don’t want him to think it.

“‘Rose’ will suffice,” the voice on the other end says, and you think you catch the tail end of a chuckle. Definitely not a dude-voice, or a dude-name, even if human naming conventions are weird as hell. Oh shit. You could have really put your foot in your mouth, there. “Welcome aboard. I’ll be out to help you with your things in a moment.”

“Thanks so much,” you say quickly, but she’s already hung up.

“I received a call from your company,” she continues, emerging from below deck. “We’re to be among the first to carry an Alternian-American observer. An illustrious honor, if I am to believe their pronouncements.”

“Have you, uh, had many observers? Human ones, I mean?” you ask, since you think that’s something that might be worth asking, maybe.

“Unfortunately, I can’t say that I have, at least in this capacity. This will be my first voyage at the helm. We’ll simply have to learn together. That’s not to say I’m inexperienced; I’ve been working on and off on my father’s ships as purser for the past decade, though I’ve quite recently ascended to captaincy.”

“Oh,” you say. “Well, yeah, I guess obviously this is my first time too.”

“Obviously,” she says, and you really think the expression she makes might sort of be a smile, but it’s completely impossible to tell.

You’re thrown too off balance by all of this to stop her as she reaches over and takes your baskets easily in hand, hoisting them over the railing, and then extends an arm for your duffel. This is worth gaping at; humans aren’t supposed to be this strong. She’s tall, older, probably, though you’re not very good at guessing humans’ ages. You’d place her in her mid-thirties, ‘old’ enough for a species that only lives to like ninety, usually.

“Planning to come aboard?” she asks, as you take a little too long to react, and you shake your head vaguely.

“I was thinkin’ I’d do the safety check first, if that’s okay?” you say.

“Shit,” she says, “of course. The error is mine. Please, by all means.”

You leave your other things at the dock, flipping out your clipboard and making sure you have your logbook open to the right page. Of course, a boat like this isn’t going to have any glaring violations, but you make sure to meticulously log all of the emergency flotation devices and fire extinguishers and all that, erring on the side of caution.

“How many crew members do you have aboard for the trip?” you ask.

“Five, including myself,” she explains. “Small for a vessel of this size, but it’s an excellent crew.”

The emergency life raft is approved for up to seven occupants. All good, all inspected within the last month, according to the documentation she provides.

“So, this all looks great,” you say, as she leads you into the wheelhouse to see their drill logs, completed literally the week prior across the board, meticulously documented. “Seriously, you’ve got a gorgeous ship.”

“She isn’t mine just yet,” Rose says, though with the same enigmatic not-smile that makes it wildly difficult to tell what she really means by what she’s saying. “You may have noticed that we plan to embark on quite an extended voyage. I have a wager going with my father, who’ll be leaving port with his own crew fairly shortly. The Earthsea, which he has semi-recently acquired, will be serving as our mothership and processing our catch, and when we outperform his crew and meet our quota for the season in half the prescribed timeline, this will be _my_ ship.”

“_Oh_,” you say. “I, well, I’ll try not to, uh, get underfoot too much.”

“It’s truly a friendly competition between family, and hopefully no cause for alarm on your part. All should proceed according to plan. I do like to think that I’m fairly good at this. Now, your bunk,” she says, only to be cut off as someone bangs on the door of the wheelhouse.

“Rose!” the person interrupts. “Hey, Rose! We’re back, and we got you Taco Bell!”

A dark-haired man’s face, about Rose’s age, appears in the window, waving a paper bag emblazoned with a purple bell, and she sighs heavily.

“Jade, our engineer, will continue to orient you once I have my crunchwrap supreme in hand.”

“Miss, Captain, uh,” you say, as she begins to move for the door.

“Yes?” she says, turning expectantly.

“Not everyone knows too much about Alternian biology and all that stuff, I mean, and since it’s gonna be such a long trip, I was wondering about… sopor?”

She frowns.

“Right, of course. I hadn’t considered… yes. I understand your concerns. I’ll see about quickly installing one of the portable… I’ll have to call my wife in. It won’t be an inconvenience at all, worry not, she’s Alternian-American herself.”

You let out a sigh of relief as she steps smartly out, chiding the interrupting man and presumably taking her lunch. Everything keeps happening so much. Several of the items on your checklist that require more extensive write-ups are incomplete. Unsure whether you’re allowed to use her chair, not wanting to piss her off right before you have to spend a wholeass month living and dying by her decisions, you lean awkwardly against the wall to finish documenting the check.

“Hey there!” an unfamiliar woman announces, joining you in the wheelhouse. “You must be Eridan. So nice to meet you!”

Her long dark hair is braided up into a sort of lopsided topknot, and she smiles, fully and sincerely, upon making eye contact with you. So at least the whole boat doesn’t prescribe to Rose’s school of unintelligible stoicism. Yet another sigh of relief. You reach out to shake her hand, and she accepts the offer eagerly, holds on for just a beat too long.

“Ooh! Chilly! So you’re - right!” she says excitedly. “Rose mentioned we’re getting a sopor well. I’m probably gonna have to pick your brain a bit about installation parameters, but I figure it’ll be no trouble! I’m Jade, by the way. This is going to be a pretty intense trip. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rose so wound up. But we’ll all do our best to make sure you’re comfy and keeping up with all the fishing! Seriously, this is probably the best crew ever, we’ve all known each other for ages, and Dave’s back, and I’m pretty sure he’ll keep Rose from going off the deep end. I bet you’re going to want to see the quarters, right?”

She’s right, you do, and you follow her dutifully, clipboard under your arm, life preserver still stuck weirdly under your chin, down to the bunkrooms. Rose and another crew member share one stateroom, two bunks are tucked beneath the bow, and a second stateroom on the port side, closer to the galley, will be yours, shared with an additional crew member. You toss your backpack on the bare bottom bunk, which should fit your duffel and your sleeping bag perfectly. Jade immediately begins examining the space, whips out a measuring tape and everything, narrating as she goes with what little she knows of the sopor device you may or may not be receiving.

“If you want anything from the galley, feel free!” she adds. “John’s our cook, he’s the best, be nice to him, we do three meals a day most days, but we’ll probably be down to two on days when we set _and_ retrieve more than four sets of gear. You’ll figure out pretty quick that even though we’ve all got fancy titles and stuff, pretty much everybody does everything around here. We even trade off on the roller! But like, in between, or if you’re not sampling, if there’s no one around to make you food, you can literally forage around for whatever, he’ll let you know what he’s got plans for.”

So that’s three… four? of five crew members accounted for. There’s some chatter going on from the deck, filtering down below, and you extricate yourself from the conversation-slash-extended-exposition with Jade and climb back up, thinking you probably ought to at least write down everyone’s names, suddenly so nervous that you’re nearly vibrating.

Rose is, as she promised, eating a crunchwrap supreme.

“Ah, here he is,” she says, through a bite of the burrito.

The dark haired man from before waves immediately, and a new man, a blond in aviator shades, nods once in your direction.

“John, Dave, this is Eridan. He’ll be our observer, and this is as much his first voyage as it will be ours under the auspices of my leadership.”

“So what you’re saying,” the first guy (the Taco Bell guy?) says, “is that we should mess with him as much as possible, so he knows we respect him as one of the crew?”

You blanch. Hopefully not visibly.

“This,” Rose tells you, “is John. He’s our cook, and he will comport himself appropriately or he will find himself on the menu. Is that understood?”

“Dirk would have let me -”

“My father is not here, and I will politely request that you, at a minimum, refrain from undermining my authority in the presence of our observer if you cannot abide by that guidance in general.”

“Christ, Rose, you’re gonna give the little dude a fear aneurysm. Can trolls get aneurysms? Oh my god, you’re freaking him out so much that you’re inventing medical conditions for an entire species. They’re going to name a wholeass neurological syndrome after you. It’s gonna be on t-shirts. Trolls and people will be marching side-by-side for a cure, and it’s all your fault. That’s fucked up, dude, you gotta watch out for that shit,” the other crew member, who must be Dave, says.

You make a sincere effort to puff up your chest - you’re not actually little, you’re almost as tall as any of them, and you’re still growing, damn it, your lifespan is orders of magnitude beyond theirs - but this endeavor is thwarted by your life vest, which you’re starting to realize was transparently designed for human anatomy, and you nearly choke yourself out in the process.

“Yeah,” John adds. “What would Kanaya say?”

“Realistically, Kanaya would say that was hot, because it kinda was. Anyway, hi dude, I’m Dave, the first mate. Rose is my sister. Don’t think about that too much. I try to forget about it when I can.”

“He succeeds with the sort of frequency and regularity that ignites feverish interest in any psychologist in a fifty-meter radius,” Rose adds.

“Love you too, sis.”

You nod mutely.

The thing is, nothing about this is _bad_. You’ve been trained to deal with active hostility, with xenophobia, with all sorts of crazy scenarios from drug use to harassment to language barriers to limited meal options. What you can’t imagine surviving for the next month is the tight-knit insularity of this crew, the fact that John immediately goes off on some separate tangent about an inside joke involving Game of Thrones or something that actually prompts Rose to crack a smile (a real smile!) and Dave disappears to find Jade and it’s as though you’re present, but completely invisible.

It’s a horrible sinking feeling, that you’re going to be completely and hopelessly alone, surrounded by people who actually like each other - or worse, that the tension rippling beneath their interactions will boil over into something truly awful and inescapable on a boat in the middle of the vastness of the Bering Sea.

Obviously, no one really wants to get too buddy-buddy with observers. For all Rose is maintaining a facade of professionalism, you’re fundamentally here to collect biological data, yeah, but also to keep track of what she does and write it down if she fucks up. Your presence is going to make whatever the hell she’s trying to pull off much harder.

But you’d been hoping, at least, that it wouldn’t just be a repeat of everything else leading up to this, that you could win them over, that you wouldn’t be the odd guy out for once in your pathetic life. There was even a glimmer of encouragement back there, this isn’t a crew of xenophobes, her _wife_ is a troll!

No such fucking luck.

Rose’s cell phone begins to play a somewhat tinny yet still haunting violin arrangement, and she picks it up and flips the thing open immediately. How the actual hell was she texting so coherently on that little piece of shit, you wonder? You haven’t adjusted yet to the old-fashioned texting method on your employer-issued flip phone, and you left your beloved iphone at home, since your carrier straight-up doesn’t offer coverage at most of these ports, and you’re brutally reminded of what a moronic first impression you must have made.

Bluh.

What the hell else were you expecting? You feel a stabbing impulse to make a break for it, to just grab your baskets and run for the bunkhouse, to call your dad and tell him you fucked up and you need a ticket home, sooner rather than later. A full fucking month. You’re going to be on this boat for a month. That’s so much time for shit to go belly-up. So much time to be miserable and alone, just you and the ocean and all the memories of every idiot thing you’ve ever done.

A month might even be enough time for a full highlight reel.

“Hello, my love,” Rose says, interrupting your self pity spiral, “have you been able to come up with a portable sopor well?”

Okay, you’re officially too far into this to back out and run away. Probably. No matter how much you want to. Those fuckin’ things are expensive as hell, and even if you get the vibe that this boat isn’t exactly struggling for money, that’s still a lot more guilt than you’re ready to shovel onto your guilt-heap.

“Yes. He’s… well, I can’t say we’ve had much opportunity to get to know each other at the moment, but I believe he’s violetblooded? I’ll let her know. Thank you, dearest.”

She hangs up.

“John, could you let Jade know that the sopor well is ready, through some goddamned witchery on the part of my wife? She’s fiddling with the thermal specifications back at our house as we speak, and she’ll be able to answer any questions about maintenance, of which I trust there will be many.”

“Aye-aye, Captain!” John replies, saluting and bounding back to the galley entrance. “Oh! By the way, observer-dude, have you got any weird diet things? I’m hitting the supermarket before we go, and I don’t want you starving to death on my watch because you didn’t speak up when you had the chance!”

“Oh,” you say, caught off guard. “Not really, I mean, I guess I eat a lot of meat, and pretty much anything else? As long as you don’t cook the hell out of it. Especially fish.”

Hopefully that wasn’t too rude. John doesn’t seem to register your own discomfort with the explanation, nodding thoughtfully.

“Fish, huh? Well, you’re in the right place. If you want to kick a few halibut my way under the table…”

“John,” Rose says sharply. “Observer. This is an observer.”

“Fine, if you want to gently hand me any halibut _over_ the metaphorical legitimacy-table…”

“He’s a fucking wizard with halibut,” Dave cuts in. “I want to eat John’s almond-crusted halibut for my last meal. I would commit a string of brutal murders exclusively for the opportunity to request it on death row. It’s actually tragic how not-kidding I am.”

You reluctantly crack an uncomfortable half-smile, just grateful that no one seems to be calling you a stuck-up piece of shit yet, which means you’ve been keeping it under wraps better than usual.

“Alright, I’m going to review our course and the weather forecasts and make a few more calls while we’re still in wireless range,” Rose announces. “Dave, a gear review would not be out of order, and I imagine our observer would be interested to know how we do things. John…”

“I’ll go shopping,” John says with a wink. “Can’t get in trouble at the Safeway, can I?”

“I’ve known you for too long to make any such pronouncements,” Rose sighs, patting him fondly on the shoulder and disappearing into the wheelhouse.

“Hey! Is Rose already locked up in her office?” Jade calls, before the awkward silence between you and Dave can become physically untenable. “I’m getting the sopor well, and I texted your dad about some spare parts, since we’re going to be out for so long and we’ve had some engine troubles on the last few trips.”

“Which one?” Dave replies testily.

“Roxy, duh! He said he’d be by in a few. If you can grab those for me, just stick ‘em in my bunk, I’d be eternally grateful!”

“It’s never just Roxy,” he mutters, but nods to Jade as she shoots him a double thumbs-up and hops over onto the dock with a bag that clanks on her shoulder in tow. “So, how long did you say you’d been doing this?”

Once it’s clear that he’s talking to you - well, should have been immediately obvious, you’re the only other person on deck - your mouth goes dry.

“Three weeks?” you say, and it comes out as a question. “But just in training, y’know. Makin’ sure I got the math and the regulations down and everything.”

“Shit. Well, don’t sweat it. I haven’t been on a boat in years. You’re not going to be the only one on here figuring it out as they go.”

That isn’t much of a relief, but you laugh a bit as though it is.

“What made you come back?”

“Rose,” he says, shrugging. “Can’t say no to Rose, ‘specially when she’s getting the gang back together to stick it to our dad. C’mon, let me show you around the gear.”

They’ll be using mixed gear, of course, since that takes twenty times more math and a thousand times more paperwork on your part, but Dave does a very straightforward job of explaining the whys and hows of their hook counts, spacings, baiting practices, and soak times. You take dutiful notes, probably way too many, and he doesn’t mention it, though you almost definitely come off like a total newbie.

As he sorts through gear, conducting his own check and periodically taking out a tape measure to verify his numbers, he asks a few questions of you intermittently, without any particular interest.

You’re from the general Seattle area, studied marine bio, graduated about four months ago, and you’ve never actually worked on a boat before, but you know you don’t get seasick from fishing trips with your dad, who does halibut sport fishing, mostly.

“Cool,” Dave says, gloved fingers flying over a rack of hooks, with an intonation that makes it pretty clear that none of this sincerely strikes him as especially cool on any level.

“What do you do, when you’re not, uh, doing this?” you ask, in a moment when he pauses after explaining their bird deterrence methods (paired streamers from a fisheries service-issued bird bag) and seems to be at the end of his spiel.

“I teach at a little college down in Florida. About as far from here as I can physically get, y’know.”

“Seriously? So you’re like, Doctor First Mate?”

He laughs at that.

“Yeah, doctor of paleontology. Rose is Doctor Captain. Don’t call her that, I think I wore the joke out in the month after she passed her thesis defense.”

“Gotcha.”

“Okay, if you don’t have any more questions or whatever, let’s drag the rest of your stuff onboard and get you all set up.”

You’re sure you’re going to have a lot more questions. Your head is pretty much spinning from all of this, way too many numbers and figures and so many forms you’re going to have to figure out even before they start hauling. Since they’re targeting both halibut and sablefish, you’re going to have to stay on your toes for predominant species counts and the contingent sex/lengths and otolith collection. Did training even specifically cover this? You don’t think it did. The whole thing is turning your stomach way worse than the gentle rocking of the deck in the calm waters of the harbor.

Dave tosses you your duffel, then your backpack, and you think you’re just probably going to have to get used to these freakishly strong humans over the next month. It’s a bit of a hit to the ego, but you’ve taken enough of those in the last few years that it doesn’t phase you nearly so much anymore.

Honestly, you’d been kind of hoping to impress them. But it doesn’t seem like anything about you is going to be impressive, here, except for maybe how poorly your life jacket fits.

“Davey baby!”

You glance up in alarm from your slightly-damp stuff to see an older guy who looks remarkably like Dave materialized next to him on the dock, already having enveloped your new first mate in what looks like an exceptional hug. He’s greying and a bit lined in the face, but they’re obviously related. From your vantage point, it’s clear that they even style their hair in the same way.

So this is his dad. Or at least one of them. The Roxy one, probably, based on the promised engine components in his arms, revealed as soon as he releases Dave from the embrace.

“Missed you, dad,” he says, taking a pump and maybe a small motor and - you know what, you have no hope of figuring out what any of this is - from his arms and depositing it on deck, going in for another hug. “God, why don’t you ever visit me?”

“Uh, you’re a bajillion miles away, lil dude! And we came down last summer, remember?”

“Yeah, too fucking vividly,” Dave sighs, but he doesn’t end the hug.

It kind of feels like you shouldn’t stick around to watch this, but you also haven’t been strictly instructed to do anything, so you pick up your clipboard, pretend to be writing more stuff down about your sample frame or the gear or whatever, and eavesdrop surreptitiously.

“Where’s Rosie? I have to get my hugs in, she’s been dodging me since we made port, and she promised she was going to have us over for dinner, it’s been for-_ever_ since we saw her wife, I mean, hardly at all since the wedding. What’s the deal, there? They got some kind of 24/7 BDSM thing goin’ on that she can’t share with her parents? Not that I’d be weird about it, Davey, tell her I’m cool with it, I’m hip with the kids, and Dirk would - well, he’d probably be kinda _too_ cool with it, actually, maybe she’s right to keep the whips and chains on the downlow -”

“Kanaya is very busy,” Rose interrupts, emerging from the wheelhouse, already frowning, which is probably for the best. Your face has almost certainly gone aubergine-purple and if your gills weren’t smushed under the life preserver they’d be rippling with discomfort and totally giving you away right now.

“Oh, baby, don’t worry! I just wonder, I’m your dad and I can’t help it!”

“I’m aware,” she says briskly. “Shall we perhaps avoid traumatizing the observer too extensively with any details of your colorful relationship with father, or thus-informed speculation on my own?”

Shit. Rose is married to a troll, she can definitely tell you heard _everything_. Roxy blushes, then turns his attention over to you, cod help you.

“Dirk said you kids had an observer! I didn’t figure you’d get one of the new trolls so soon.”

“How did he find out?” Dave asks, crossing his arms. “I thought this shit was supposed to be confidential?”

Horrifyingly enough, he turns what is clearly a suspicious gaze, even beneath sunglasses, in your direction. Your throat seizes with repressed anxiety, and you make a sincere effort not to gape like a dying fish as you struggle for an answer that won’t make you look like some kind of spy.

“Oh, you know DiStri, he has his ways,” Roxy says amiably. “Pretty sure he’s got half the folks in town reporting whenever someone walks by with a set of baskets. We’ve got a newbie on the Earthsea, plus a gal who’s been doin’ it for a few years, and he knew before they were even on the plane up!”

Wait. Shit. Your baskets, the enormous fucking noise-mess dragging them down here created - you must have been an easy mark, and hanging around their boat before she let you on… no one warned you about that stuff! But they’re all right. This is completely your stupid fault.

Nice first impression.

You can basically imagine your dad saying it. Might as well be the disparaging voice in your internal monologue. Everyone’s got their own deal, obviously, you don’t have the right to be criticizing any of these people, but shit, you can’t imagine being all standoffish at a dad that just wants to be friendly and huggy and shit. Seems like some kinda dream. Rose doesn’t know how good she has it.

Not that you’re making judgements or anything.

“Well, thank you for bringing over the parts. I know this will be a relief to Jade,” Rose says shortly, crossing her arms.

“Jade’s not around?” Roxy asks, sounding disappointed. “I was hoping we could have an engineers gossip sesh, damn. It’s going to be forever before I see you guys outside of work!”

“We’ll be offloading to the Earthsea,” Rose replies. “I’m sure you’ll have your chance.”

“You know I’m proud of you, right? So proud! Of everything, literally! My brilliant, talented, beautiful daughter, come here, _one_ hug. It’s not just me, either, you know your daddy is a tough one to read, but he’s literally over the moon to have you two working together on one of his boats again.”

“I think I can tell her that myself, Rox.”

“Can you?” he asks, turning to greet a second older man with a kiss to the cheek. “I dunno if I’ve ever seen you express, like, an emotion that easily. No ‘fense, babe.”

“You could be onto something there.”

“Dad,” Dave says shortly, at the same time Rose says “good afternoon, father.”

Both seem to be standing up straighter, conspicuously not looking at each other or at their parents. You’ve mostly run out of random shit to write on your clipboard, so you start tallying the number of starfish you can count on the underside of the dock. Fine, you’re a nosy piece of shit, what the fuck is new?

“She looks good,” he announces, glancing from bow to stern of the craft with a slight nod that you imagine is intended to be approving.

“I should hope so. We leave port in about three hours,” Rose says.

“Bait?”

“Herring.”

“Hope you didn’t pick that up from fuckin’ SkaiCorp. Last order of theirs we got was half rotted. Cal has some killer pollock on ice, last I heard, it’s not too late to switch over.”

“We have our own contracts. The herring will suffice.”

“Your funeral.”

“Okay, I really didn’t come down here to talk shop!” Roxy interrupts. “Especially not about iced herring, tbh, which is pretty nasty. Just wanted to lay eyes on the two of you before you go hard as hell on the ocean and catch the shit out of all the fish. Mmkay?”

He tousles Dave’s hair, pressing several kisses against his forehead as Dave mumbles vague objections despite very much leaning into the hug, then blows a kiss to Rose. The thin line of her mouth tightens slightly, but she forces a half-smile of acknowledgement.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that dinner, Rosie!” he adds.

“The thought had not crossed my mind.”

“Look out for your sister,” he tells Dave. “No Captain Ahab-ing allowed! Everyone comes home safe! That’s the rule. Wear your life jacket!”

Dave stiffens and ends the hug.

“Yeah. Promise. Love you,” he says, ducking a last kiss and helping his dad off the boat. “Hope everything goes great with the, uh, engineering. Make the boat work good? Neer the shit outta that engine?”

“I always do, baby, or your daddy wouldn’ta kept me around for so long!”

“I’ll be down in a bit, Rox. Tie off by eight. Get in touch with our observers, do the safety runthrough, you know the drill.”

“Sure do! Love you guys, good luck!”

“If I knew this was what it would take to get Dave back into the industry I’d have offered you the Prince years ago,” Dirk says, flatly, once Roxy is gone - between him and Rose, it’s totally impossible to figure out what either of them mean by basically anything they’re saying. There’s dead zero subtext, or else there’s some infinite well of subtext to every microinflection that you couldn’t hope to understand.

“Not permanently,” Dave cuts in. “Just this trip.”

“We’ll see.”

“Yeah, no, still post-traumatically stress disordered, thanks, just actually coming through for Rose, for once, since it’s time someone in this family did.”

“Ouch. Right in the place where they usually put the heart. You both turned out just fine.”

“How about you come visit me again and I’ll introduce you to my psychiatrist. Y’all can have a chat. She’ll probably shake your hand for the amount I’m shelling out so I don’t lose my shit every time someone talks too loud. My childhood paid for her fuckin’ car. I’m tapping out, Rose, find me in the wheelhouse and yell at me for being a bitch when he’s gone.”

“Dave, please,” she calls after him, but he’s disappeared with impressive speed. “I’m sorry, I’ll work on him.”

“You absolutely don’t need to do that.”

“I _absolutely_ do.”

“Not your job, Rose.”

“I don’t see you stepping up.”

Dirk exhales slowly, not exactly what you’d characterize as a sigh, but as though he’s steadying himself for something.

“Roxy’s right. I’m glad to have the two of you back together on the Prince. Pull this off, make this crew work, and that’ll be the end of it. She’s yours.”

“Those terms were already set. This isn’t a negotiation,” she says.

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Good.”

“I _am_ proud of you. Both of you.”

She nods once, curtly, in acknowledgement. It’s one of those weird gestures that you’re pretty sure means a whole lot of shit, but they might as well be speaking Mandarin. Also, why the fuck are you still out here? You literally can’t get off the deck without walking between them, so you just. Don’t. Just stand there and fucking watch.

Master class in observing, you guess. Nice work, Eridan.

Then he turns to you, and you freeze in earnest.

“Don’t get in her way. That isn’t a threat. It’s the best advice you’re likely to hear this lifetime,” Dirk says coldly.

Even though his eyes are hidden by a pair of frankly ridiculous sunglasses, the intensity of his… well, his _something_, certainly, holds you in place like a bug pinned to a specimen board. You feel about two feet tall. You want to evaporate, or melt, or otherwise change physical states in the sorta way that gets him to stop _looking at you_ like that.

Rose steps forward, putting out her arm as though to shield you from him.

You feel an unaccountable rush of gratitude toward the not-quite-middle-aged woman standing between you and the most terrifying entity you have ever encountered, including your own dad. You can’t decide whether putting the two of them in a room together would compound their ungodly intimidation factor through some kind of arcane alliance or result in at least one death. Probably the latter.

“Your help is unnecessary on this front. I would be a truly useless captain if I could only capably perform my job in the absence of an observer. Nothing less than the ocean itself can slow me down, let alone stop me, _father_.”

The corner of his mouth twitches slightly. You have absolutely no idea why.

“Incompetence is a powerful thing,” he says. “Be smart. Make me proud. Show me you’re strong enough for this.”

“I will, and I am,” she insists. “Don’t keep your crew waiting.”

He taps the corner of one of the lenses of his sunglasses with a fingertip, a gesture that could be a casual intimation of a salute or a mockery of one. Your gills are stabbing nearly through your life preserver with pure nervous energy.

Rose lets out a sigh of relief once he turns to leave, palpable even from three feet away. She no longer seems quite so tall, looks older, tired.

“John should be back soon with the groceries. I’m going to speak with Dave,” she tells you. “We’ll leave port by six. I apologize on my father’s account. He means well.”

_Does he_? you want to demand, in your best petulant-child-voice, but you can’t quite open your mouth for it.

Instead, you nod mutely and step aside as she exits into the wheelhouse.

Well, what the fuck are you supposed to do after that? You sit down on your duffel and stare back at the shore, thinking that you’re probably the most fucked entity on the face of the planet. That your entire life, and everything else leading up to this, is just some sort of infinite fuck-Eridan-up plot, that you’re going to be miserable here, and everywhere, forever.

You want to go home.

But you also don’t, because you know what’s waiting for you if you fail at this. What kept you going through the rough patches in college, through your job search, every fucking second. You can’t just fall short of what you’re supposed to be. You can fudge it, here and there, because he doesn’t really care enough to spot-check your GPA so long as it gets you hired, doesn’t interrogate you about your friends so much as like to see you pretend to have some, and it’s fine.

It’ll be fine. But it’ll also be worse than anything has ever been. You are completely and utterly sure of that.

Shit.

“Hey dude! Can’t find your bunk or something?” John calls from down the docks, arms laden with Safeway bags.

“Just, uh, sittin’,” you reply, finding your voice hoarse and stupid-sounding.

“Sure looks like it! Hey, can you grab some of the lighter stuff for me and bring it to the galley? Just, like, some bread and all.”

You shrug and take the bags he offers, stack them on top of the duffel already swung on your back. Frankly, you could carry a lot more, but that’s not a fight you want to have when you already feel so completely defeated by the day.

“There you go,” he says gently, and you frown until you realize he’s talking to someone else.

From the corner of your eye, you watch him help a black-shelled Carapacian onboard. The mysterious fifth crew member. You stop in the galley doorway as he tries to convince John to hand him a plastic bag of canned goods, a request that John affectionately denies.

“Nah, I got it! Promise. Hey, if you want to fill in a couple of nights, whip us up a casserole, I’m not saying no,” he laughs. “You met the Mayor yet, observer? Holy shit, this is going to change your life!”

The Mayor waves. You think he might be smiling, though it’s hard to tell.

You don’t often smile, at least not in the typical human-type situations. There’s plenty of biological evidence that trolls do this kind of shit differently; seadwellers especially, while amphibious, are optimized for submerged communication in low light conditions. Baring your teeth, at best, is typically considered a sort of threat. It’s not that your dad is never happy, but he shows it different. Careful to stick to how things used to be, since most of the trolls he works with are actual Alternian refugees instead of new blood like you and your brother.

No mixed signals. You miss that about home, if not too much else. At least you pretty much always knew where you stood. Even on the still water of the harbor, you can already feel the ship swaying slightly beneath your feet. It may be a month before you feel stable ground.

He smiles a little wider, though, that’s definitely what he’s doing, now, that’s a full-on smile. Shit, you don’t know anything about Carapicians, and it’s kind of too late to whip out your laptop and do some messy Googling.

John sort of waits, like something has to happen before he’ll usher you into the galley, so you grit your teeth for a second, force yourself to stop overthinking shit, and pull back your lips in an awkward jagged-toothed smile of your own.

Your teeth fall out periodically, and rows of them wait to poke back up behind your present set. Curved inward slightly, so if you were to take a piece out of something, your fangs would stay buried in it until you managed to rip off the flesh to which you were bound.

So it really makes sense that it’s a threat, right? Fuck if you actually know jack shit about this kind of interspecies… everything, but it seems to work out fine.

The Mayor nods, turning to tug gently at John’s sleeve.

“Aw, you guys are gonna get along great. I’m so jealous! Jade rolls around so much in the middle of the night, and it takes for-_ev_-er to wake her up.”

As though this is a shared joke - seriously, him too? - the Mayor nods knowingly as he trails the two of you in to put away supplies.

To John’s credit, you guess, he clearly heard you on the meat front. There’s a ton of frozen fish, stacked cuts of beef and chicken, all of which gets organized in the freezer. He wards you away to the table with a wooden spoon, then laughs about it, insisting that you sit down and make yourself comfortable.

“You’re here to observe, right?” he adds, and you shrug. “Better see you taking notes on the kitchen layout! No slacking allowed around here.”

You weren’t planning on helping anyway, and you’re really fucking done with awkwardly pretending to write shit down (he might be joking?), though as you watch, the Mayor hovers around and darts in a few times to stuff a package of paper towels under the sink or to drag off a massive jug of hand soap. You wonder if you’re being unforgivably rude. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Couldn’t make anything worse.

Crossing your arms, you realize you haven’t taken off the stupid jacket off yet, and you wrestle it off, shuffling your way to your bunk, where you toss your backpack and duffel, grateful to finally be able to breathe again. The bed is smaller than even your shitty twin XL back in school, with a low wooden lip that looks like it probably won’t be adequate to keep you from rolling out if the ship moves even slightly. Fuck. You dick around with your sleeping bag a bit, trying to make it look a little less fucking depressing, situate your backpack, mostly stuffed with clothes anyway, as a pillow, and… that’s it.

That’s home for the next four weeks.

You can’t believe you’re going to be completely and totally stuck here. It doesn’t seem real, but it’s way too real at the same time. You just can’t even fully process it. Especially not staring up at the wood frame of the bunk overhead - shit, you haven’t shared a room since your sophomore year, and the sheer indignity of bunk beds is… is…

Something you’re going to have to live with. Fuck it, you’re going to have to live with this.

You crawl out from the bed and stare at your handiwork for a moment. Without the life jacket on, whether or not it’s head-and-shoulders more comfortable with your gills moving freely above your t-shirt, you feel weirdly small. The claustrophobia is already getting to you. It’s, what, like four in the afternoon? It’d be five back in Seattle. Time zones.

Maybe you should call someone. Just send a last message your dad’s way. Text Cronus or something. He’d make a huge deal out of it, but you kind of almost want that. Just for someone to pay attention to you for a second. It’s a problem, this sort of… thing that happens to you sometimes. The loneliness deal. You’re fuckin’ trying, you like, recognize that you’re a piece of shit sometimes, but it’s still… it sucks.

This was sort of supposed to help.

Like, you thought it might.

You shake your head, compulsively clean your glasses, which don’t need cleaning at all, and head up the steep ladder-like indoor stairs to the wheelhouse. At least you’ve missed any shouting going on in the aftermath of the fucked up family situation you’ve walked into.

Rose is staring intently at a set of depth charts, and Dave is doing something on his phone with his feet up near the window. Through the spotless glass, mountains loom over the harbor, wreathed in mist. It’s been raining all morning, but the weather is supposed to let up soon.

After a second, you clear your throat. They look up in unison.

“I’m all moved in, so if it ain’t too much trouble, I might sit out dinner and try and get some sleep,” you say.

“It’s no trouble at all,” Rose says. “We’ll arrive at the fishing grounds after an eleven hour steam, at roughly six tomorrow morning, depending on when the weather turns. Someone will wake you up for hook and spacing counts. I believe that’s typically when observers perform them on a setup like ours.”

You’re pretty sure there’s other stuff you should probably be asking her. Probably a list somewhere in your overstuffed binder-manual accumulated during training. But there’s a tension in the wheelhouse that’s making you wildly uncomfortable, and you already know way more than you want to about everything _but_ the fishing, so you just nod awkwardly and head back to your bunk.

Maybe you doze off at some point. Mostly you don’t. You’re probably breaking a personal record for not mouthing off about dumb shit, because there’s no one to talk to. Just you in a dark little cell of a room, getting darker as the sun sets. Sounds and smells of cooking filter in from the kitchen; Jade returns, and you’re displaced temporarily as she affixes the portable sopor well, designed to envelope most of your upper body, beneath the bunk overhead. It’s a sleek, futuristic-looking contraption, designed to fold down for rest and fold back up to not get in the way.

She’s kind, in a chatty sort of way, but perfunctory. And then you’re alone again, and voices sound over dinner. You’re to the point where you can pretty much recognize all of them, even muffled by the door to your bunk; everyone sounds happy and normal, no matter how jacked up the vibe is underneath. They can still act normal together.

You sigh and lean back against your backpack-pillow, the zipper digging into your scalp. You actually are tired as hell, and you can feel yourself drifting.

The door opens, an unexpected noise, and you’re snapped back into full awareness as golden light floods in. It’s your bunkmate, which you probably shouldn’t expected. The engine of the boat wakes up beneath you; so it’s time to head out.

He smiles at you again.

Without John to like, peer pressure you or whatever, you don’t bother smiling back. He doesn’t seem to mind. You really wish you knew what his deal was. He’s the wildcard in all this, isn’t he? Like, you thought you were going to be the only weirdass alien refugee hangin’ around, but… you try to convince yourself that he’s not deliberately stealing your thunder on that front, because that’s an insane conclusion and you really need to get your head out of your ass.

He flashes you a double thumbs-up, and cants his head questioningly, like, _you good_?

For some reason, this actively upsets you. Obviously, you’re not! _Obviously_, everything sucks for you in a way that nothing has ever sucked for anyone else ever, and you’re trying to do better and be better and it’s not working, it’s not _going_ to work, and you’re hungry, and you should have gone to dinner but just the thought of crawling out there and asking for food makes you want to throw up.

What you say is “yeah, fuckin’ great. Good night.”

The boat begins to rock in earnest. You wonder what the port looks like disappearing behind you, but you can’t bring yourself to get up, drag your ass out, and watch.

He shrugs, shucks off his boots, and hops lightly into the bunk above you. You hear some sort of bizarre scratching noise - who the fuck knows, who the _fuck_ even knows what’s going on anymore, or ever, in general - and then reaches over the side of his bunk, a scrap of paper torn from some kind of label in hand.

It says, in blocky lettering, IT’S HARD.

You frown at the note. The scratching noise begins again, and he passes you down a second note. You take it mechanically, not even really thinking about the action.

I UNDERSTAND.

Does he? How could he?

(How could he not? You’re literally in the same boat, no matter how much the humans in the crew seem to adore him and vaguely disdain you. You’re alone out here. Both of you.)

“Thanks,” you say, feeling like you should say something.

More scratching.

GOOD NIGHT.

That’s fuckin’ all. What more is there to say, between two aliens who probably don’t even really speak the same language?

It reminds you, though, in the midst of your wallowing, that you have a choice about some of this stuff, at least. You take out your phone, eye the waning bars in the upper left corner, and draft a quick text, your fingers clumsy but purposeful on the tiny little flip-phone buttons.

CA: hey dad. wwere shippin out. four wweeks probably. 

CA: lovve you. hope alls good at home.

You don’t expect a response, and you don’t get one. It’s still the right thing to do, probably more for you than for him, even. It’s still a step in the direction of _trying_, and you’ve _been trying_, you really have. The slips of paper rustle over the fabric of your sleeping bag as you watch the last remaining bar on your phone disappear and reach for the retractable arm to bring the sopor well down to body level.

The sopor is perfectly temperate and it slides easily over your arms and your chest, once you unbutton your shirt most of the way down, fitting almost inside of your sleeping bag. The seas aren’t too rough. You start to fall asleep in earnest. Thank fuckin’ god. Tomorrow’s gonna be early, and it’s going to suck, and you haven’t forgotten how much you already hate this.

Outside of the sopor well, though, your fingers close around one of the loose notes as you stretch a final time. You force your eyes open and glance down.

I UNDERSTAND.

The situation could probably be worse. Maybe you can make this work.

After a few minutes, the rocking motion of the waves begins to lull you back into a daze, and you slowly fall into a dreamless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thus ends the first chapter of the most self-indulgent piece of writing I have ever done, written mostly while waiting for a gale to pass, anchored beside an island populated exclusively by feral cows.
> 
> I swear to god I am playing this concept straight and there is a plan.


End file.
